John:
Good afternoon from Capitol Hill.
As the Republican House majority settles into committee assignments, the investigations into the Biden administration are beginning in earnest. House Oversight Committee Chairman James Comer (R-KY) announced today that he will have the first hearing on Biden family “influence peddling” next week. House Judiciary led by Chairman Jim Jordan (R-OH) will begin investigating failures that led to the border crisis. The first hearing looking at Biden’s COVID policies will take place on Feb 8.
Interest has increased in uncovering the relationship between government and pharmaceutical companies with the revelations from Project Veritas that Pfizer has been secretly experimenting on new, more powerful strains of the coronavirus, which Pfizer seemingly admitted to in a Friday night release. Just last week, Speaker Kevin McCarthy (R-CA) announced new members to a select committee to investigate the COVID pandemic, and committee member Rep. Ronny Jackson (R-TX) promised to hold Pfizer executives accountable.
Yet, one of the most important issues facing this new Congress is the spending and debt battle that is heating up. House and Senate Republicans are demanding spending cuts to the woke and weaponized bureaucracy be attached to any debt limit increase and the Biden White House is vowing not to negotiate at all. Though, the Biden stance met resistance from Wall Street as financial firms indicated they agreed with conservative lawmakers that payment prioritization would allow the government to pay its debts even if the limit is reached.
On Friday, 23 Senators led by Sen. Mike Lee (R-UT) wrote to President Biden “to express our outright opposition to a debt-ceiling hike without real structural spending reform that reduces deficit spending and brings fiscal sanity back to Washington.” The senators further state in their letter the need to cut spending to the woke federal programs that are attacking everyday Americans:
“Your administration is directing federal agencies to continue to spend billions in taxpayer resources, expanding the size and scope of the IRS to go after families and small businesses, policing the speech of Americans on social media, funding equity programs in the military, and pouring money into programs for a pandemic that your administration has declared over. Americans are keenly aware that their government is not only failing to work for them - but actively working against them. We do not intend to vote for a debt-ceiling increase without structural reforms to address current and future fiscal realities, actually enforce the budget and spending rules on the books, and manage out-of-control government policies.”
Former Trump OMB Director Russ Vought also mapped out a way forward for conservatives to fight and win on the debt limit:
“In short, America cannot be saved unless the grip of woke and weaponized government is broken. That is the central and immediate threat facing the country—the one that our statesmen must now rise tall to vanquish. Thus, the main priority of congressional Republicans in the upcoming fight over the debt limit should be to deliberately link the effort to rein in out-of-control spending with the removal of the scourge of a woke and weaponized bureaucracy.”
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One more thing…
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Sincerely,
Wesley Denton
Senior Director of Communications
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